International Art News

Dana Schutz Swimming, Smoking, Crying, 2009 Oil on canvas 45 x 48 in. Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas, Gift of Marti and Tony Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer Brothers Foundation

From January 15 to February 26, 2012 – Miami Art Museum
Dana Schutz combines fantasy and reality, humor and horror, to create figurative paintings that abound with expressionist energy.  One of the most important young artists to emerge in the past ten years, she has developed a distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and raw and tactile brushwork.  The subjects of Schutz’s paintings spring from an absurdist sensibility as she invents imaginary stories or hypothetical situations that are bizarre and impossible, yet oddly compelling.  As the artist states, “I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.”

Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York and curated by Helaine Posner, Chief Curator. Schutz is the 2011 recipient of the Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize, awarded every two years to an artist for an early career survey and monographic catalogue. Additional funding is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Carlo Bronzini Vender and Tanya Traykovski, Helen Stambler Neuberger and Jim Neuberger, and Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell

Museum Hours

Jason Shawn Alexander - In Progress 60x72 in. oil on canvas 2011

Until Feb. 8th, 2012 – 101/exhibit
New works by Jason Shawn Alexander, the Los Angeles-based Expressionist figurative painter. The show coincides with the publication of a book, also called Undertow.
The new works come at a time of great success for the 35-year old artist. “His confidence as a figurative painter is allowing more of the process to show in his work,” said Schaffer (owner of 101/exhibit). An expert draftsman, Alexander has developed a method for mounting paper to canvas, which enables him to use his inks at the idea’s inception. He draws with fluidity and an energy he has long sought to bring to his paintings. The ink serving as a gestural skeleton, the artist then uses models to help pull out realism and sculpt the flesh of his pieces. His intimate works penetrate to the core of human integrity, often depicting images of figures wrenched in that critical space where the strained coordination of mind, body, and spirit, hangs in the balance of existential woe.

35-year old Jason Shawn Alexander’s career started when his self-published illustrations caught the attention of mainstream and independent comic book publishers. Alexander worked for years as a draftsman for Marvel, “I am very pleased to present Jason’s third exhibition at 101/exhibit,” said 33-year old Sloan Schaffer, who gave the artist his first solo show in 2009, the same year he opened his gallery. “His masterfully rich figures inhabit settings that, at times, evoke the stillness of theater. “These paintings offer the viewer a glimpse of private moments, captured in the wake of a great receding void,” said Schaffer. “With his intense personal narrative combined with overtones of allegory, the paintings are imbued with an essential human drama that is his signature quality.”
His friendship with renowned painter Kent Williams found the two sharing a studio for a time, painting side by side. Today, he has worked his way to prominence as an authentic leading voice among young contemporary American figurative painters.

Gallery Hours

From July 25 to – October 28, 2011 – National Gallery of Art
This exhibition, drawn from the rare book collection of the National Gallery of Art Library, highlights the works published by the Bauhaus and illustrates how changes in its printing activities reflect the evolution of the school. From a traditional printing shop focused on artists’ woodcuts, engravings, and lithographs, to a typography workshop that would ultimately serve as part of an advertising department, we see the growth of the school along with its leading role in the advancement of modernism.

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 when Walter Gropius took leadership of both the city’s fine art academy and its school of applied arts, and merged them. The school’s idealistic beginnings and mission of uniting fine art theory with traditional artisan craft skills is seen in its manifesto, featuring Lyonel Feininger’s Cathedral woodcut on the cover. The school’s early expressionist period is represented by the printing workshop’s graphic portfolios as well as page designs and typography developed for outside publications. A 1923 exhibition catalogue designed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer marks a turning point in the mission of the school when, under a constructivist influence, the curriculum was reoriented to marry art with technology.

How is it that an art school that was open for a mere 14 years—during which time it suffered chronic financial shortfalls, survived a turbulent political situation, claimed just 33 faculty members, and graduated only about 1,250 students—came to have such a lasting impression on modern design and art education? Yet despite these difficulties (and more), the Bauhaus did precisely that. The personalities involved, some of the leading lights of modernism, surely had much to do with so outsize an influence, as did the school’s international focus and the wide dispersal of the staff and student body upon its dissolution. Even more, however, it was the publications the Bauhaus produced that proved vital in spreading its influence; these same publications play a significant role in forming our contemporary cultural image of the school.

Museum Hours

Else Lasker-Schüler, Die Häuptlinge gehen für ihren Kaiser auf Raub aus, 1916 Tinte und farbige Kreiden, auf Karton aufgeklebt © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

21st of  January  to the  1st of May 2011 -Hamburger Bahnhof  – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) was not only a brilliant poet, but she also created an extensive body of drawings. The exhibition ‘Else Lasker-Schüler – Die Bilder/The Pictures’ is the largest exhibition to date that pays tribute to her as a fine artist. Organized in conjunction with the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main, the show contains known works that first appeared in the magazine ‘Der Sturm’, as well as several sheets now on display for the first time ever.

Else Lasker-Schüler was closely associated with the city of Berlin. Born the daughter of a banker in Wuppertal-Elbersfeld, Lasker-Schüler went on to become the leading figure in Expressionist literature, publishing her first poems in Berlin in 1899. In 1903 she married the writer Georg Lewin in Berlin, and it was her he had to thank for coming up with his pseudonym, Herwarth Walden. Walden became a central figure in the avant-garde thanks to both his magazine, ‘Der Sturm’ (‘The Storm’), which first appeared in 1910, and his gallery of the same name. Else Lasker-Schüler also helped shape the Berlin bohemian scene of the 1920s. Among her most important friends and admirers were Franz Marc, Karl Kraus and Gottfried Benn. In April 1933 Else Lasker-Schüler emigrated after having been awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize just one year earlier, settling first in Zurich, before moving on to Palestine in 1939, where she died in 1945. She was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

The catalogue to the exhibition contains all drawings the artist ever made in what amounts to an illustrated catalogue raisonné. This index of Else Lasker-Schüler’s pictorial works now means her oeuvre is accessible to the public for the first time in its entirety.

Museum Hours

A. Gottlieb, Burst 1973, 1973 Acrilico e smalto su tela. Collezione Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York. © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY, NY/by SIAE 2010

From September 4, 2010, to January 9, 2011 – Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
The exhibition surveys the art of the American artist Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974): from his initial paintings of Surrealist influence, to his expressionist and abstract works. The popularity of Gottlieb derives from his invention of a visual language more basic and universal than written language, purged of symbols with historical precedents. His Pictographs are images of what appear to be archaic symbols in irregular grids; his Bursts and Landscapes  are symbols of cosmic and universal, as well as uniquely aesthetic value. The show includes sketches, prints and sculptures. The exhibition has been organized in partnership with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York. It includes loans from the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, various private collections, as well as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou), and the Museum Frieder Burda.

Museum Hours

FRANKFURT – On 15 June 1938, on the eve of summer, he destroyed a major part of his work before shooting two bullets into his heart. Still shattered by the images of World War I, Ludwig Kirchner had been living for nearly twenty years in Davos, Switzerland, when he chose to end his life in this manner rather than see his work and his own life fall into the hands of the Nazis who were about to take over Austria, right next door. The Städel Museum shows this last period of the Impressionist painter, marked by the wide Alpine landscapes. But, as the first museum to have collected his work, it also leaves a large space to the artist’s Expressionist period in the Brücke group, in the footsteps of Matisse and Munch. This very rich retrospective – nearly 180 works including paintings, drawings and prints – presents a few pieces never seen before. It also tries to show one of its originalities: in order to reduce costs, Kirc hner often painted on both sides of the canvas. Consequently we are deprived of half of his work. For once, the back side of the canvas is brought forward, as is the case of Woman lying down in white blouse, which is finally shown at the expense of the Nude at the window…
•Kirchner at the Städel Museum, from 23 April to 25 July 2010